Getting climate risk wrong
Posted on 20 August 2025 by Ken Rice
This is a re-post from And Then There’s Physics
Ted Nordhaus has a recent article in The EcoModernist about why he stopped being a climate catastrophist. His basic argument is that we used to think that we were heading for 5oC of warming, which would have been catastrophic, but are now heading for more like 3oC of warming. Despite this good news, many in the climate science and advocacy community have refused to become less catastrophic. Ted, on the other hand, has change his mind and is no longer a climate catastrophist.
I’ve been involved in discussions about this topic for more than a decade, and I don’t think I’d ever have described Ted as a catastrophist, at least not as I would expect it to be defined. This reminds me of when one of Ted’s early colleagues – Michael Shellenberger – also wrote an article in which he suggested that he was a reformed climate activist who was now condemning alarmism. It can be a convenient narrative; you get praised for changing your mind and others might think that if you can do it, maybe they can too.
What Ted seems to be suggesting is that those who continue to cling to climate catastrophe are getting climate risk wrong. There may well be some truth to this, but Ted’s article seems to largely dismiss any climate risk. Apparently, at local and regional scales, the impact of climate change is very small when compared to climate variability. Things like sea level rise and thawing of the permafrost will occur on very long timescales. Even though warming has clearly been measured, the normalised economic cost of climate related disasters isn’t increasing. There is also apparently an absence of an anthropogenic signal in most climate and weather phenomena.
Also, technological innovation and the development of clean energy is happening anyway and we decarbonised faster prior to climate change becoming a global concern than we have since. Although the article doesn’t argue against cleaner energy it does suggest that if catastrophic climate change is not looming then there’s no reason for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy at the speed and scale necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.
My problem with these kind of arguments is that they’re not completely wrong, but they’re also not quite right. I don’t think it’s true that the impact of climate change is always small when compared to climate variability (think heatwaves and extreme precipitation). Just because the normalised cost of climate disasters isn’t increasing doesn’t mean climate change isn’t having an impact (how are you defining the null?). I also don’t think it’s true that there is an absence of an anthropogenic signal in most climate and weather phenomena (e.g., detection and attribution versus storyline)
Also, even if the trajectory we appear to now be on is heading in a less catastrophic direction than was thought to the case in the past, we’re still increasing emissions and the climate will continue to change until anthropogenic emissions get to (net) zero. There are also various uncertainties that mean that even if we do continue on the currently expected emission trajectory, we still can’t rule out warming by more than 4oC.
I don’t think this means that we should catastrophise, but I don’t think we should be complacent either. It should be possible to recognise that climate change does present some risks, even if there are going to be other factors that need to be taken into account when considering how best to motivate decarbonising global energy. As Stoat once said “if you can’t imagine anything between “catastrophic” and “nothing to worry about” then you’re not thinking“.